Life Upon the Wicked Stage

The scores and books of classic musicals are full of the warnings: “Life upon the wicked stage ain’t never what a girl supposes…” sings a winsome young gal in Act Two of “Show Boat,” (widely considered the first American ‘book’ musical).   An aging chorine in Sondheim’s brilliant masterpiece “Follies”  remembers “walkin’ off my tired feet, poundin’ 42^nd street, to be in a show….,”  Margot Channing, the heroine of “Applause” (the musical version of the classic show biz story ‘All About Eve”) welcomes Eve to the theater with the warm lines ‘welcome to a life of laryngitis, welcome to dark toilets in the hall!”  The daughters of that stage mother of all stage mothers in “Gypsy” lament how normal life could be if only “Momma was Married” rather than bellowing “Sing out Louise! Smile baby!” from the back of countless vaudeville theaters.   And truthfully, what sane responsible parent would want this for their child?  A life of constant competition, a merry go round of dance, voice and acting classes, perennially cold rehearsal spaces, scratchy costumes, far-too-late-for-your-age bedtimes, throat lozenges, and homework done while spread out on the dusty musty floors of theaters and studio spaces?

The answer of course is no sane parent.  What responsible mother would say to their child “why yes it’s a fine idea to spend all of your formative years learning skills that if you’re supremely lucky and are in the right place at the right time and know the right people and look exactly the right way possibly maybe could one day net you some unreliable and low-paying work!”  This isn’t exactly what the stuff of sensible parenting is made of.  And yet, when theater is as much a part of your world as your morning coffee, when words like “blocking,’ “off-book,” and “downstage” are as much a part of your vernacular as ‘bread and milk,” when “call” is not something you get on the phone and “house” is not the place you live, how could you deny your child the chance to also learn about, live, move and be in that world?

The love for theater runs deep in my family. My  father grew up in New Haven in the 1920s and 30s when all the major Broadway shows had their out-of-town tryouts.  He and his best friend Keith Brown were classic stage-door Johnnies, even one time sneaking into Katherine Hepburn’s dressing room only to be thrown out when she found out they were not in fact Yale men.   From this world my father carried his love of musical theater into the rest of his life as a husband and father taking my mother to New York for their honeymoon to see the original production of “Guys and Dolls,” and, years later, singing his youngest daughter to sleep with medleys from “Carousel,” “South Pacific,” and “Anything Goes.”  (Although I do need to point out that my father knew about 5 lines of every show tune ever written he never seemed to know any song in its entirety.  Only in my adulthood did I discover that not all of these songs shared “la de dum dum” as a lyric).  This early exposure to Rogers and Hammerstein, Hart, and Porter, instilled in me a love for and fascination with the world of musical comedy and an often unsettling feeling that I should be ‘doing that.’  My parents indulged my interest, taking me to five shows a summer at Maine State Theater ( formerly the Brunswick Summer Music Theater) where I insisted we sit in the front row so I could be as close to the stage as possible.

When I was in the fourth grade a troupe from the Children’s Theater of Maine came to visit my elementary school.  At the end of their riotous performance they invited any of the students to come sign up for their summer theater camp.  At ten I was pudgy to put it politely, awkward and quite shy but I remember marching up to one of the actors and announcing I was going to go to their camp, then praying I could convince my mother to let me.   Well of course she let me, if anything my parents were probably overjoyed I was finally venturing out a bit from the safety of the cocoon of my family life.   I will never forget that summer, the long hot days spent in a dilapidated warehouse doing odd acting exercises and playing a court jester in a show about the princess who wanted the moon. To this day I still remember the lesson one actor taught me about how to make it look convincing on stage when you’re drinking out of a cup with nothing in it.   To say that summer changed my life might be a bit of an exaggeration but it was the first time I felt truly at home, truly with people who understood what I knew – that there was no better place to be, no better way to spend your time.  And my parents gave me what was quite possibly the greatest gift ever.  They never tried to talk me out of it, to tell me it was a foolish pursuit, or I should spend my time studying something more practical.  They never missed a performance – even the edgy experimental student written shows in college that they didn’t understand. And at every show my mother would cry tears of pride and my father would announce ‘that’s my daughter” to everyone around him.  After college my inherent cowardice and fear of being able to navigate a big city kept me from ever making a full-time career out of acting,  but I  have been able to carve out a satisfying life working in arts management by day and occasionally treading the boards at night.

Flash forward thirty -our years from that summer with Children’s Theater and now I’m the one driving my ten year old to theater camps, rehearsals, dance classes, and performances.  When Liza was a baby I used to say I didn’t care if she ever set foot on stage I just wanted her to grow up loving the experience of going to the theater, nothing else was important.  Then, one fateful night as I was bathing three year old Liza she sat up in the tub, looked at me, frowned and said “momma, this is how I look angry…!”’  Then she laughed and said “this is how I look happy,” after making a wide-eyed faced she announced “and THIS is how I look surprised!”  I knew in that moment it was hopeless.  It was in her blood.   At first I humored her, not really ready to believe that maybe there was something there in her.  But after nearly eight years of dance classes, acting classes, summer theater camps, she continually surprises me with her tenacity, her drive, and yes her talent.  Believe me I’m no Mama Rose, (much as I would give anything to play her).  I never seem to have the right makeup or hair accessories for a given recital or performance,  I never embellish her costumes so she’ll stand out on stage.  I run errands or do crossword puzzles during her rehearsals rather than watching her and the chubby shy girl I was as a child keeps me from fully entering into conversations with the moms around me.  I don’t enroll her in the glitzy programs at better equipped theaters where local Baby Junes smile from the stage in sparkly outfits at their clapping moms, but rather in a comfortable challenging program in a run down old church basement where her teachers embrace the funny, smart, quirky girl she is while pushing her to try a little harder, reach a little higher, and soar on her own wings.  Where she comes home spouting about Chekhov, Sondheim and “the fourth wall” and “realism.”  Where she has found friends that are closer to her than her school friends. Where she is home.

I often hear from other moms, “I can’t believe how much performing she does!  It’s unreal.”  I wonder sometimes if my co-worker with the two children on multiple travel hockey teams and soccer teams hears the same thing.  If that children in sports are granted a pass that children in the arts may not be.   I hear that surely Liza must need more “down time,” and yet when she has that precious down time she spends it singing, dancing and putting on shows in our living room.  Our conversations in the car and at bedtime are about the plots of musicals, backstage goings-on, and what colleges offer good theater majors. She pores over my Broadway books, my sheet music collection and obsesses about what part she could play in Chorus Line or Wicked someday.

I’ll admit I do worry for her,  worry that my sensitive, funny girl will be lost in the shuffle of a business that all too often is based on looks.  (And let’s face it, we don’t exactly grow ‘em tiny and blonde in this family).  But mostly I worry the opposite of what the women on the ivillage messageboards think I should worry about. ( On ivillage, to publicly admit you have no qualms about your child pursuing a degree and career in the arts is right up there with admitting you didn’t breastfeed and that your child watches Family Guy – both also true in my case).  I worry that she’ll repeat my pattern and be too timid to really give it a shot.  Yet as Kelly points out to me time and time again, Liza is not me and her successes are not mine and her mistakes and triumphs will be different than mine were.   So for now, I drive her where she needs to be, I never miss a performance,  I hug her when she cries because a show is over,  and I cry tears of pride when she sings, and tell everyone in earshot she’s my daughter.   And somewhere, my dad is smiling as the tradition continues.

Sing out Liza.   We’re all listening.

Goodnight Joseph. Goodnight Mary.

Joseph and Mary.  When you see those names does your mind go to that famous biblical couple that gets so much play around this time of year?   Of course. That’s only natural, they’re a pretty big power couple round the holidays.  But when I see those names I think of another couple.  I think of my Joseph and Mary. I think of my parents.

My  father was born in 1916 in New Haven Connecticut to deaf parents — an Italian mother and an Irish father, both first generation Americans.   His family life tended to be on the boisterous side with an Italian grandmother who more than once got in trouble during Prohibition for making wine in his family’s basement, Irish relatives who ran a speakeasy (where he tended bar well before his teens) and a mother fond of placing bets with the local bookies.  He took a young woman named Marian Bergeron to his high school prom.  Marian would later go on to become Miss America 1933.   Swarthy and dark with a cigarette eternally on his lips he went on to college at the University of Miami and was stationed on the Panama Canal during World War II.   As a child I was fascinated by his stories of his pet boa constrictor and his trip to Cuba with his father to tour the rum factories, of his endless parade of cousins with names like “Doll Doll” “Big Al,” and “Chop Chop,” of his stories of riding street cars to school and being taken to a brothel by his dad as a teen to “become a man.”   Even though Connecticut was only a few hours away from our home in Maine, his life seemed worlds away from anything I could comprehend and I wondered what it would have been like to know this grandmother who dried pasta over the backs of her dining room chairs every Sunday and this grandfather who smoked a pipe and carried a pocket watch and had a smile that said “here kid, here’s a quarter go buy yourself a pack of gum.”   For me they did and do exist only in the photo that now rests on my living room shelf.

By contrast my mother grew up in the squeakiest clean city in the country – Salt Lake City.   Born in 1926, also to deaf parents, she lived a life of ice cream with her older brothers on the front porch of their big house, of Pioneer Days and taking care of her baby brother 16 years her junior.  She remembered her childhood as being ‘very poor,’ even though her mother insisted there was “always room for another pair of feet under the kitchen table.’ Hers was a life where being Catholic in a Mormon city meant not being able to be in her best friend’s wedding. Her college studies kept her close to home at the University of Utah.  The photos of her mother looked like what Norman Rockwell would have painted if you prompted him with the word “grandma,” large and gray haired with a permanent smile that said “come in so I can make you a tuna sandwich and a glass of milk.”  As a child I used to stare at her photos wondering what it would have been like to sit on her lap and bury my head in that expansive bosom perennially covered by an apron in nearly every picture.   I was fortunate enough to know my mother’s father however as he lived with us for most of my childhood.  He was the son of a southern gentleman and former slave owner from Arkansas.  An elegant man who dressed in a shirt and tie every day well into his 90s, someone who’d spring for a lobster dinner without thinking but giggle with glee if he managed to get through Sunday mass without putting a dollar in the collection basket.

From these two disparate backgrounds the Catholic good girl from Utah and the chain smoking charmer from Connecticut met in Washington DC where they were each doing graduate work in their studies in education of the deaf at Gallaudet College.   My mother used to tell me when she saw my father in the dining hall she declared “that’s the man I’m going to marry.”  Seven years later my father finally proposed at a DC gas station with the tremendously romantic proposition “Well….how about it?”   On subsequent trips to DC with my family my father would always try to find that same gas station (now in a less than desirable neighborhood) to pay homage to this historic occasion.

My parents story is a love story, of a New Haven boy raised on Italian wine at dinner and bourbon afterwards and his Salt Lake City girl who never had a drink until they met; of two people bound together by the unique experience of growing up with deaf parents, by their tremendous faith and devotion to their church and their firm belief that family was everything;  of a couple that moved  from DC to California to Maine as my father’s career in deaf education progressed until their lives finally settled on an island with a son and two daughters, where lasagna and sauce cooked in the kitchen and scrabble games were played over bourbon manhattans.    They wrote love notes to each other bought each other cards for their ‘half- anniversaries.”  They hugged often and kissed under the mistletoe (and every where else much to the mortification of their teenaged youngest daughter).  My mother, a great correspondent, would sit at night writing cards and letters and my father would watch Pavarotti sing ‘I Pagliacci” on PBS and cry.   And every night from my room across the hall I would hear them say “Goodnight Joseph.  Good night Mary.”

My father died twenty years ago today after a short battle with malignant melanoma.  Once in the waning days of his illness as I felt his life and my tether to a family history I would never recapture slipping away I brought home a copy of “Moonstruck” to watch with him.  After the movie I asked him if it reminded him of his Italian relatives.  From his bed on the couch he smiled wanly and said “my family wasn’t that quiet.”   When I lost my father I lost my biggest fan, who never missed a school, summer stock or community theater performance.  I lost my walking partner who’d tramp for hours with me around our island or our subsequent neighborhoods telling me stories of his past and guiding me as I started uncertainly toward my future.  I lost the man who’d lie on the floor with me in front of the Christmas tree playing game after game of “I spy.”   I lost the man who taught me to love Broadway musicals and Pauline Kael’s movie reviews in the New Yorker.  In many ways when I lost him I lost my childhood and while I no longer can hear his voice in my head to this day the smell of Old Spice instantly makes me think of his bear hugs.

My mom lived eighteen long years after my father’s death, finally giving in to the aggressive breast cancer that took her from us two years ago  (almost exactly to the day that my father died).  Where my father was everyone’s friend and was greeted with shouts of “hey Joe!” wherever he went, my mother, the eternal schoolteacher, was always “Mrs. Youngs” much to her chagrin. Lacking my father’s bon vivant embrace of life she was the navigator guiding our family’s ship through waters both calm and troubled.  She drove carpool and made lunches of tomato soup and grilled cheese.  She made sure we never missed mass, that we wrote our thank you letters before we played with our toys at Christmas, that we knew how to sign so we could communicate with our grandfather, and that we always respected our teachers.  She oversaw our household chores but turned a blind eye when my brother and I would try to clear everything off the kitchen table in one trip or when my sister and I would have water fights while doing the dishes.  She made cookies with me to send to my brother in college, weathered my sister’s tempestuous battles with my father and had a tendency to get weepy at any play, assembly or  sporting event where one of her kids had a chance to shine.  Her door was always open to students needing someone to talk to and her lap was always available for the sobs of emotional daughters struggling to understand life.  Every once in a while she’d break her own rules and let me or my sister stay home from school for no reason saying that “sometimes you just need a day.”  Of course it wasn’t always perfect.  My mother often frustrated me – her worship of my older brother and her way of pursing her lips in disapproval at my choices grated on me and I often felt I couldn’t do anything right.  But when I lost her I lost my confidante, my companion in watching the Kennedy Center honors, my political debate partner, my resource for everything from how long to cook a pork roast to how to weather my infant daughter’s colic.  And of course I lost that lap to cry on.

At my father’s funeral, just before the casket was closed, I knelt with my mother to say goodbye.  She whispered to me “every night I would say Goodnight Joseph ….”  And then she touched my father’s hand and through her tears said it one last time. For years after my father died she would insist that the cracking of her ice in her nightly glass of bourbon and ginger was him saying good night to her.  At my mother’s funeral I couldn’t bring myself to say ‘goodnight Mary” but I knew that somewhere somehow they were together to say it to each other.   For me, time has healed that first intense rush of grief and now on this anniversary weekend of both of their passings, I will say it tonight and know they are with each other and that they are with me.

Good night Joseph. Good night Mary.

The Cat Who Crashed Through the Ceiling and Other Tales of A Family Christmas

The other day someone asked me how long Kelly had been living with us and as I stopped to add up the weeks I realized it was just shy of three months. Three months?  That’s it?  So seamlessly has our family life shifted and expanded to include Kelly and the cats that it feels as though we’ve always been a family of three (well ok seven if you count the cats).  Oh sure there have been the “why do you leave the dishes on the counter instead of putting them in the dishwasher?”, the “Is there a reason you like to leave cupboards open after you get something out of them?” and the “I JUST swept that floor and now there’s shredded cheese all over it” er…discussions.  (And no, I’m not going to tell you who the culprits were in any of those examples).   And of course there have been the delightful “you folded and put away the laundry and started dinner?”,  “YOU scooped the litter box?” and the “why don’t I pick up the girl today to give you a little extra time at work?” surprises.   The other night when Kelly worked an additional 3-11 shift I found I couldn’t go to sleep without her there, so accustomed I’d become to our pillow talk at the end of the day.

Spatz the Christmas Cat in a deceptively peaceful moment

So all in all it’s your basic family life with all those “ little things” (with apologies to Mr. Sondheim) that make it all worthwhile and maddening at the same time. And for me, someone who’s felt rudderless with little family for so long, it provides that mooring, that safe harbor to return to each night.  So of course I was looking forward to a ‘real’ family Christmas this year and making our home warm and full of holiday cheer.

After five years as my partner, Kelly is indulgent of my penchant for decorating at Christmas, and humors my endless “No! the Santa on the bike goes on the phone table not the coffee table!” decrees.  However, this year we had to navigate new furniture and the absence of old, resulting in Kelly gallantly clearing her sideboard to give the Santa mugs a new home, and my agreeing to cull down some of the duplicates so they would all fit.  The crèche and the nutcracker collection found new spots as well and it all seemed to work out ok.  Much to my relief the cats left things alone for the most part, although Spatz does show a marked preference for alternating between tipping over and sleeping on top of the  basket of lights and pinecones I have in the living room.  But then there was the issue of the tree.  “In 43 years I’ve never had a fake tree!” I declared.  But Kelly would hear none of it as she worried about cats eating the needles, drinking sap infused water out of the tree stand and dying horrible pine scented deaths.  When she finally uttered the magic phrase “oh for heaven’s sake I’ll even BUY the tree” she finally had a deal.  We managed to find one that wouldn’t break our bank and looked somewhat realistic so one night we set out to set it up while Liza was off at a friend’s house.  The minute we took endless bunches of color-coded branches out of the box and read the instructions I started to cry.  This was so wrong!   Christmas trees came from our annual trip to the lot near the Dunkin Donuts and arrived at our home precariously balanced on the jeep and leaving a trail of needles as we wrestled it through the door – not FROM A BOX.”   Kelly,  bless her heart gently offered to take the tree back and throw the fates to the wind with a real tree so I dried my tears and persevered.  By golly it started to look like a tree.  By the time we got the lights on I felt much better and announced Liza and her friend and I would decorate it the next day while Kelly worked.

The next day while Liza and her friend played up in her room I decided to fold a quick load of laundry before bringing up the decorations.  As I knelt on the floor near the washer/dryer closet folding and sorting I heard a rustling above my head followed by a meow as our cat Spatz suddenly poked his nose through the foam ceiling tile of my drop ceiling.  He had jumped from washer to storage box and into the ceiling tiles quicker than I can polish off a bag of Ruffles.  Did I mention the celing tiles are foam? As in non-cat-body-weight supporting foam?   Much to his dismay I wrestled him to the ground closed the closet door, replaced the tile and sent him on his way.  Less than 30 minutes later as the girls headed down to the basement we heard a thud followed by “mommmma…you better come down here.”  Sure enough Spatz had repeated his new trick and surfed the foam tile down to the carpet below, sauntering away with a look that read “something happened to your ceiling.”

Fortunately I had the tree to distract him.

For the entire first week following our tree trimming we’d return home to find branches knocked off, ornaments rolled across the room and one particularly lovely Clara Nutcracker ornament repeatedly taken down.  While the other cats regarded the tree with mild confusion Spatz saw it as a challenge.  He chewed on lights, batted at ornaments and climbed the fake trunk of the tree in a quest to find those antique breakable family ornaments I’d placed on the  topmost branches in an effort to keep them safe.   After days of me pulling him out of the tree and threatening to banish him to the snow we finally came to a truce the day I returned home to find his favorite toy (a stuffed dog he stole from Liza’s room) lovingly tucked under the tree as a peace offering.  He hasn’t so much as bothered a branch sincet. I can’t say the same for the basement ceiling but in exchange for his leaving the tree alone I daily replace the ceiling tiles and go about my day.

The holiday season can be brutal when you work both in a theater and bookstore and have a daughter who performs in dance, music, and theater.  Between the multiple nutcrackers and Christmas Carols (last tally 4 of the former, 2 of the latter) and the shelving and scanning and the “my wife wants some book that has blue in the title, or maybe the cover is blue. I forget. Anyway do you have that one?”s, it’s easy to just want to wish the holidays away so that life can return to its peaceful ordered existence free of misshapen gingerbread houses and mad dashes to Target and “which costume do you need for today?” conversations.   But the other night when I returned from the theater around 9pm, we ended up all gathering round the dining room table as Kelly researched honeymoon destinations and Liza created virtual rooms on Barbie.com and I relaxed with my nutritionist-sanctioned one glass of Shiraz. I looked at the room bathed in the glow of the tree lights, at the Santa mugs in their new spot, and at the cats curled up near the heating vent and was suddenly gripped with the kind of Christmas excitement I haven’t felt in years.  “You guys!” I said, “look! It’s our first real family Christmas!”  Kelly smiled and murmured ‘mmmm’ without taking her eyes from her search for special Napa Valley Inns, but Liza looked up at me, rolled her eyes and gave me the best Christmas gift she possibly could have.  “ Mommmmma! We’ve been a family for years! The only difference this year is that we all live together..duhhhh!”   Of course Liza, of course.   It may not be “God bless us everyone,” but for my family it’s pretty darn close.  Merry Christmas.

Death and The Holidays

A year ago I wrote a piece “On Giving Thanks for a New Kind of Family” in which I reconciled my lack of ‘real’ family with the family I’ve created for my self – my friends  who have embraced me literally and figuratively with a fierceness and a love that humbles and touches me.    This year as I again faced a Thanksgiving day spent mostly alone – Kelly working and Liza  with her dad and his family – I found myself slipping back into those patterns of self pity.   Yet, anyone who knows me, knows the last thing I want to be is that person you see coming and think “great here she comes dragging her trail of dead family members behind her like some kind of badge.”  Of course I’m not entirely lacking in family. I have a wonderful big brother, but his busy life as a criminal prosecutor and the comings and goings of his three active teenage boys make it hard for us to get together more than once a year if that.  Kelly’s family has welcomed me into their midst with love and hospitality and I look forward to the day when they are all my in-laws.  And yes, next year at this time Kelly and Liza and I will officially be a family of three, a prospect which excites me and fills those empty spaces in my heart.  But that six-week stretch between Thanksgiving and New Years is full of reminders of my family holidays past and it is always a struggle for me to get through it in one piece .

A recent trend on Facebook has been to undertake a “thirty days of gratitude exercise” and today it seemed everyone’s post mentioned being grateful for FAMILY (all in caps naturally) and the cooking skills of uncles and moms and grandmothers, of baking pies with siblings and rousing games of flag football on frozen lawns.  To read these posts one would think everyone lived in that “very special” Thanksgiving episode of General Hospital where the Quartermaines stop bickering and welcome the Webbers and the Spencers to their house for a lavish dinner and everyone wears turtleneck sweaters whilst sipping wine in front of crackling fires.  Yet, here I sat in an empty house with the four cats for company watching a marathon of  “Ru Paul’s Drag Race “on the LOGO network.  (Frankly, I’m stunned I’m not inspiration for a Hallmark card with a holiday tradition like this. ) Yet, as I read post after post about large family gatherings and travels to distant places and family recipes handed down from generation to generation, I realized that my family has its own morbidly unique tradition:  we all die at the holidays.

Now don’t blanche at that statement.  It’s ok.  Death is part of life after all, and really, what better time to pass away than when your family is already gathered together and the churches are bedecked with evergreens and twinkle lights? When you’ve driven to as many family funerals as I have in front of the backdrop of holiday decorations you develop a certain macabre sense of humor about it.   It all started December 21, 1980 when my grandfather, who lived with us, had a massive heart attack in the back seat of my family station wagon and fell over and died on my 14-year old shoulder.  “He died with someone he loved more than anything, “ my mom would often say to me.  At the time I was traumatized but as the years went on, I realized I had the makings of one hell of a cocktail party story.  Friends sent casseroles and deli trays to my family and for the next decade we made deli sandwiches on Christmas Eve as a nod to those days following his death, and our truncated celebration that year was the first time I’d spend the holidays wrapped in the cocoon of my family as we mourned the loss of someone close to us.

Ten years later my father would pass away on January 9^th after an all-too quick battle with malignant melanoma and his funeral took place in the same family church with the same nativity scene in the corner and the same wreaths hung by red velvet ribbons along the walls.   My father’s death is something I don’t speak of often.   I was his baby girl and he was my hero.  He taught me about Broadway musicals and crossword puzzles, how to read the New Yorker, the value of a good walking stick, and how to make the perfect bourbon and ginger for my mother.  His dual Irish/Italian heritage meant he was prone to downing more than a few manhattans each night and then crying while listening to Pavarotti sing  I Pagliacci.   Losing him left a wound on my heart and a hole in my life that has never been filled and not a day goes by that I don’t wish he were here to see me and his granddaughter who looks and acts so much like I did at ten.   For the next thirteen years we celebrated the holidays with out him, my mother alternating between Thanksgivings with my brother and Christmases with my sister, and always raising a toast to my dad on December 28^th, their wedding anniversary.

Then in 2003 holiday death came calling for someone far, far too young.  My 45- year old sister was diagnosed with multiple myeloma right after Labor Day and died two days before Thanksgiving.   Shell-shocked at this unexpected loss, my brother, mother and I journeyed to Maryland on Thanksgiving Day for the sad occasion of her funeral.   I’ll never forget that long drive from the Baltimore airport to her home in Salisbury, tired, sad and hungry, we stopped at a convenience store for a Thanksgiving dinner of cracker sandwiches and peanuts.   When I returned to New Hampshire the following Monday I was stunned to see the world ablaze with Christmas lights and decorations.  Three weeks later we held a memorial service for Marie at our family church in Maine  — same nativity scene, same wreaths, same deli sandwiches.  By now we had the holiday funeral down pat.

With my sister’s death still raw my brother and I never anticipated that ten months  later we would be faced with my mother’s stage four breast cancer diagnosis.  Coming as it did in July of that year I remember sitting with her at her oncologist appointment thinking idly, “well we’ll have her for another five months,” so sure was I that she too would follow our family pattern of a diagnosis and quick death just in time for the holidays.   I didn’t count on my mother’s tenacity.  She fought back for the next three years, recovering from major invasive surgery, working through physical therapy, enjoying a brief remission, and several more trips out for lunch and dinner with her best friends, “the ABC ladies” who dined alphabetically through all of Greater Portland’s hot restaurants.   But sure enough in December, 2007 during a holiday visit from me and Liza, and my brother and his youngest son, my mom’s condition turned suddenly, horrifically grave and she was rushed to the hospital. There we were once again in the family waiting room under the soft glow of Christmas lights with holiday muzak in the background.  On January 3^rd they told us there was no hope.  On January 7^th she died and her funeral at that same family church was full of what was by now the comforting and familiar presence of pointsettias and wise men and murmured words of condolences over deli sandwiches from the local Shaws.   During those long sad final days by her bedside my brother and I would often smile wryly at each other and say “here we are again huh, planning a Christmas funeral.”  There’s more I want to say about my mother but that loss is too new still too fresh and who she was deserves more than a pithy sentence at the end of this paragraph.

I share this not to elicit pity or sympathy. My losses are no more or no less tragic than anyone else’s and if anything, they’ve given me, the queen of self -deprecation, some great material.  I share this as explanation for my obsession with gathering my loved ones to me during the holidays, for my insistence that the Christmas lights and decorations (including my impressive and often-mocked Santa Mug collection) come out the day after Thanksgiving, for my reluctance to be alone, for my need to hug Liza tighter than ever, for my love of Christmas carols on the cd player and endless viewings of the musical Scrooge, and for my tendency to tear up when Kelly holds me.   You see, this magical time from Thanksgiving to New Year’s for me is as much about loss as it is about light and giving, as much about pain and sorrow as it is about laughter and pecan pie. But it has given me a fierce appreciation for the people in my life who mean so much to me – for Kelly and Liza who are my world, for my brother Patrick, my sister-in-law Marti and my nephews, for my best friends Joe, Katie, Meghan, Dana, Margaret, Susie, Tara, June, Vicki and Lisa and Debbie,  for “my boys” Chris, Nathan, Jeff and Matt, my new gal pals Deb and Jenn,  and for my amazing cyber pals from Mothertalkers, Banshees and May 99 moms.   During this time I may write you a little more, I may hug you a little harder or reach for your hand more often, I may call a little too much. Or I may get quiet and pull back when I fear my neediness is becoming intrusive.  Bear with me.  You mean the world to me and when you’ve already lost your world three times over you want to hold on to what is left.   To say I am thankful for you would be inadequate.  To say I appreciate you would be trite.  To say I love you would be the truth — imperfect as it may be.   Happy Holidays to you… my family.

Dear People of Maine

Dear People of Maine:

This summer I wrote about taking my family to Maine for a    vacation.  I wrote of the deep love I feel for that stretch of Southern Maine from Oqunquit to Falmouth that holds the memories of my childhood and teenage years in every mile.  I wrote about long days on the beach chasing waves, searching for sand dollars, and grappling with the ghosts of family who haunted me at every turn. I wrote about the satisfaction of sharing stories of skee-ball prowess at Old Orchard with my brother and illicit bar crawls through Portland with my sister.  I wrote of the quiet emptiness that came of gathering at my parent’s gravesite and the need to connect with my home state and its people in places as pedestrian as the local Hannaford or cultured as the Portland Museum of Art.  During our days and nights on Higgins Beach we blended seamlessly with every other family there.  Why shouldn’t we?  We, after all, were just another family trying to keep the beach umbrella from blowing away and wondering if 10am was too early to open the big bag of sour cream and onion potato chips.  The fact that my family had two moms instead of a mom and a dad never turned anyone’s head. And really, why should it have?  In fact the house we rented for that glorious week belonged to an old friend from high school and her wife.  Clearly this was a welcoming community in a welcoming state.

As we drove down Route One that August Saturday on our way home, crammed into my jeep Liberty, tanned, with our stash of Len Libby Chocolate jammed near the air conditioning vents so it wouldn’t melt, I felt a tug at my heart as I realized that as much as I’ve come to feel at home in the rocky individualistic landscape of New Hampshire, Maine would always be the home that welcomed me back again and again.

Until last Tuesday.

Last spring when Maine Governor John Baldacci gave his stamp of approval to legislation allowing gays and lesbians to marry I rejoiced.  The momentum of that act carried forward to June when New Hampshire Governor John Lynch signed marriage equality into law as well.   Kelly and I talked about how great it was to have the option to either get married here in the state we both call home or perhaps to entertain ideas of a seaside wedding in Ogunquit, our favorite quick jaunt destination.   During those days it never occurred to me that the people of Maine would vote to approve a referendum grounded in  hatred, discrimination, and injustice and take away the right that had been granted.   When I woke Wednesday morning to the news of the previous days voting on Referendum One I felt as though I had been punched in the stomach.  To quote the character I’m playing in a show right now “how selfish and how cruel.”  Selfish to feel that one has the audacious right to vote on whether another human being can marry the person she loves and cruel to exercise that vote with such callous disregard for the people and families it will affect.

This week had been hard on many fronts.  Liza was sick and out of school for two days which necessitated the tried and true “working mom of a sick kid” juggling act.  Two shows at the theater I work at had me driving back to work as soon as Kelly got home from her job as a nurse to relieve me at home.  A long frustrating search for a costume for my show had left me as usual hating the oversized and oddly-shaped body I inhabit and envying the young slender women who had a world of costumes to choose from.  By Saturday tempers were flaring at home as the stir-craziness of the sick house set in.  My peri-menopausal hormones in full swing I snapped at Liza for her attitude and petulance and burst into tears when Kelly made a joke about my costume hunt.  When I returned from the theater that evening, I was greeted by a scene that made me cry for completely different reasons.  Kelly informed me she and Liza had shared many long talks, folded laundry together, made and ate dinner together (Liza set and cleared the table), researched astrology and family trees on the internet, and that during that time Kelly had gently asked Liza to “give mommy a break now and then.”  The house of turmoil I had left was clean and calm.  I apologized for my tears and outburst and they shared the knowing look of two people who had decided the third was lovably crazy and told me it was ok.  As we turned in for the night I reflected on how blessed I was to have my girls.

This family scene could have been replayed thousands of times over in homes all across the country.  The fact that the players were two women and a child rather than a man, woman, and child bears no consequence.  This is my family, yes but at the end of the day it is just a family like any other — one full of hugs and hurts and tears and misunderstandings and game nights and grocery store runs and school chorus concerts and holiday traditions and vacation trips to the beaches of Maine.

So to the people of Maine I ask what is so threatening about this family picture?  The ugly prospect of joint newspaper subscriptions and arguments over which way to hang the toilet paper?  The repulsive thought of Kelly and I discussing who took the garbage out last? The terrifying concept of us being able to make medical decisions for each other without carrying around a lawyers briefcase full of legal documents?  The horrifying idea that there would be two moms from one family volunteering at the pizza table at the school fundraiser?  The disgusting image of our holiday Christmas cards?   We are your neighbors, your brothers, your sisters, your mothers and fathers and your friends.  We are next to you in church and in front of you at the movies.  We cheer our kids on the soccer field and dance recital stages.  We complain about our tax burden with you and gather in the morning to relive the best moments of the Super Bowl or the American Idol finale.  We care for our elderly parents and struggle to make ends meet in difficult times.   And in these difficult times we want what you want – to build a life and a legacy with the person we love.

And finally, dear People of Maine, let me reassure you that if a vote comes my way asking me if I feel it is ‘right’ for heterosexuals to marry each other or if I feel it is a threat to my way of life, I will remember this week and the way I felt and I will not turn my back on you as you have on me.  I will stand up for equality for everyone.  Because it’s the right thing to do.

If Wishes Were Horses

I wish….

That I knew how to tap dance

That I understood the appeal of hiking

That I was a better writer

That the Carol Burnett Show was still on the air

That Liza still held my hand when we walk on the beach

That I liked yogurt

That I could take a walk with my father one more time

That the day after the Oscars was a nationally sanctioned day of rest

That there was a sports team, any sports team, I was remotely interested in.

That I was more effective at my job

That I trusted my ability to sing

That I didn’t hyperventilate when it was time for costume measurements

That I trusted my friends not to care about my costume measurements.

That money didn’t worry me so

That I could pick up Liza every day at 2:10 like other moms

That I liked to cook

That I was better at confronting people who have hurt me

That peak foliage would last two months and winter only one

That I had found the courage to come out to my mother

That I had something more creative to write about

That I didn’t worry what the other moms at Liza’s school think of me.

That I was kinder in word and deed

That I knew what the cat found so fascinating under the living room chair

That I took the time to go explore the woods behind my house

That I was more serious of purpose

That I had Kelly’s wit

That I didn’t fall so in love with the character I’m playing. The goodbye will hurt.

That I had realized how loud that cool new clock in the living room would be.

That I could call my sister and tell her I was sorry for being such a bratty kid.

That I had a sense of style

That I could spend a long morning over coffee with my college roomie.

That I wasn’t so chicken

That my oldest nephew would realize how much his family loves him

That I could motivate myself to exercise.

That I hadn’t hurt my ex husband so deeply

That I didn’t love reality tv so much

That my brother lived closer

That I cared about statistics and surveys and studies

That I had been a better mom to Liza in her early years.

That I had the guts to tell my friend to get the help she needs before she dies.

That typing that sentence didn’t make me cry.

That I could live with the mistakes of my past.

That Dani was here to tell me we all have pasts and we all live with them.

That Kelly could really know how madly passionately desperately I love her.

That I didn’t have to stop writing this and go to work.

That we could have a national discourse without screaming at each other.

That the fact that I want to marry Kelly would be a non issue to everyone.

That I  wasn’t such a sap and didn’t cry every time Liza goes on stage

That for today I can make at least one person laugh out loud.

That I will find one friend I haven’t seen in a long time and tell them I love them.

 

What are your wishes?

 

 

 

 

Empty Spaces: Musings On Absent Friends.

In one of the (to my mind) unfortunate consequences of the social media revolution we are often besieged with poems and quotes from friends and acquaintances waxing rhapsodic about the place of friendship in our lives.  “Friends come into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime” is a popular forward along with all sorts of instructions about how many friends to send it on to and then of course the obligatory way to count whether you have enough friends in each category.  Then there are the occasional ‘your friend sent you a friendship flower!” messages on Facebook, or the gifts of “Friends are Forever!” flair for your virtual corkboard.

It will probably come to as a surprise to some that I ignore those. I’m sorry if that sounds harsh. But in these the waning months of the 43^rd year of my life I have a hard time taking that kind of stuff seriously. Friendships can not be nourished with a cheesy email or a virtual pink flower.  My friends occupy a cherished place in my life and I take the care and feeding of those relationships seriously. But every time I get another quaint forward instructing me to ‘send this to 10 amazing friends” my thoughts and my heart go to one place: the friends I am missing, the absent friends and the empty spaces they have left behind.  I don’t mean friends who live some distance away from me — things like Facebook and iChat have rendered distance all but meaningless and I often connect with them daily.  No, I’m speaking of the friends who still occupy prime real estate in my heart but not in my life: friends who have died… and friends who have left me.

The first category is of course inevitable.  Part of living is accepting that people die, even your friends. Friends like Mark, the talented dancer who used to charm me with his Janet Jackson imitations over the dining hall tables at Holy Cross, and whose versions of “It Ain’t Necessarily So” and “Sit Down You’re Rockin’ the Boat” will stay with me forever.  The memory of Mark, whose future seemed so bright, and who died of AIDS in the early 90s before any of us who eventually came out of the closet were even close to doing so, remains frozne in time in the photos of our college heyday.  There is Sue, the gifted and slightly nutty director who pushed me to new creative breakthroughs and who lost her battle with her demons, leaving a hole in many lives in the NH theater community.   Or Kim, whose red hair and endless legs turned every head in the room, who had the ability to encourage even the shyest, heaviest woman that she could be a powerful strong dancer in her jazzercise classes, and whose battle with a rare cancer was fought with astonishing grace and inimitable style.  And then there is Dani. Dani, who I think of every day and every time “Rubberband Man” comes on my iPod.  Dani, whose pictures populate my home and office, who encouraged me to be true to who I really was, whose sly humor and beautiful smile made every dinner party, coffee shop gathering, or impromptu get-together special. Dani taught us all the value of a life well lived and, as importantly, that there is such a thing as a good death, a peaceful passing surrounded by friends, the color purple, music, and poetry.

I grieve the loss of these friends and their place in my world. But the friends who haunt me more are those still living, still close by, still in my heart, yet parted from me because of who I am.  In college I was blessed with two amazing friends I met the first week of freshman year. We took classes together, studied together, worked on shows together, sang together, partied together. We spent time in each others homes and grew close to each others families.  While one of us moved to far off places two of us remained within an hour of each other for the next two decades.  We were maids of honor and bridesmaids, godmothers and honorary aunts.  As we grew into women with young marriages we spent time in our new apartments, took bike rides and beach trips, drank gallons of wine and planned our futures.  We went through each others pregnancies together, pushed our babies through shopping malls on hot summer days just for the free air conditioning, commiserated over tantrums and potty training and the outrageous proliferation of shiny plastic toys in our house.   When we were fortunate enough for all three of us to be together we’d gather for wine or coffee while our kids played and reminisce about all that we had gone through together. They were the sisters of my heart and we joked about how while two of us together was wonderful, the three of us together always felt complete.

Then my marriage ended and I came out of the closet. (That very cut and dried declarative sentence hints at a story best told in stages perhaps at another time) Telling people about this change in my life was terrifying and as any gay person knows you don’t come out just once you come out over and over again. The prospect of having that conversation with my closest friends was daunting but I remained confident they would love me unconditionally even though they may not understand. For the most part that is what happened, my friends listened, they hugged, they asked questions, and in the end I like to think our friendships were stronger. For the most part.

I had haltingly, fumblingly tried to tell one of my friends what I was struggling with in that last painful year of my marriage. One night I opened an email from her that pulled the rug out from under me.  She told me in no uncertain terms she could never “approve” of this “lifestyle” I had “chosen” that she had even struggled with the fact that some of our best friends had already made that journey out of the closet and wondered what that said about her that she had ‘all these gay friends.’  She concluded by saying everything would be fine as long as I didn’t talk about it anymore and didn’t go “waving any rainbow flags in her face.”  This was six years ago and writing those words now still makes me cry.   How could she not see I was who I had always been? How could she not see I was finally trying to be all that I was supposed to be?  How could she say these things? She eventually apologized – but only for ‘drinking wine and writing emails late at night.’  A few months later,  we tried to get together again with our girls as we had for so many years but something had changed.  Conversation didn’t flow freely, I couldn’t talk to her about anything real anymore.  We watched the kids play at the children’s museum and parted awkwardly.  I haven’t seen her since.  She lives twenty minutes away from me, has a daughter the exact age as mine, writes beautifully, and shares a past with me that I treasure, but now lives a life I can no longer share.  We exchanged Christmas cards for a while but even those stopped eventually.  Briefly, after the loss of her father (oh how I adored her parents) and my mom, sympathies and platitudes were exchanged.  But for all purposes she is gone.   My other friend, the third part of this trio never opened the door for these conversations.  I tried a few times to talk over email about my new life, about Kelly, about how happy I am.  I tried to talk about how much I missed our other friend.  To do so guaranteed there would be no return email.  She briefly appeared on Facebook where so many of our college crew enjoy near daily exchanges and a few ‘real life’ reunions.  I let myself get my hopes up that this would bring her back to us.  It didn’t. She just as quickly disappeared.

I live a life so full, so rich, so blessed with friends from all corners of the globe that I tell myself this shouldn’t matter anymore.  That six years later I should be used to a life without them.  But the truth is that as much as I grieve the loss of my friends who died too young I grieve the loss of these sisters of my heart who left me.   I miss them. I wonder if they’ll read this and see themselves in it.  I wonder if they’ll ever come back to me.

So you see why cutesy cyber flowers and balloons irritate me, for they are easy ways out of truly nourishing the friendships that feed our lives. If there are friends in your life you’ve let slip away, go now and find them.   If there are wounds that need to heal, if there are rifts that need to mend, go now and fix them.   And if you have a friend in need, a friend in pain, a friend who needs help that maybe you can’t understand, go now and listen to them.  If you’re too far to connect, write them – an email, a letter, send a card – but please no forwards and no flair.   Let them know they matter.  I wish I could.

Is a Katie By Any Other Name Still a Katie?

I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with my last name.   Growing up, my last name of Youngs put me at the end of every class list.  I spent twelve years looking at the back of Michael Wilson’s head in various homerooms and in high school of course the fates assigned me a locker next to James Young who was about a foot shorter than me and therefore always had to duck out of the way when I opened my top locker door.   In college it mean t I spent graduation sitting next to Patricia Yurkinas and Pete Yauch, two people I had managed to go four years without ever having met.   I spent 23 years explaining to  people that  my last name was indeed “Young’ with an ‘s’ on the end and my unfortunate handwriting caused more than one form letter to be addressed to Katie Yangs.

In 1989 I married Liza’s dad David and happily took his last name of Goodman.  “Finally,” I thought…”a nice last name in the early part of the Alphabet, but not so early that I will end up in the front of the line for anything. “  And so for the next 15 years I went merrily along without giving much of a thought to my name, which now seemed perfect.  My career progressed, my network of contacts and friends grew, I was appearing in many local theater productions, and slowly I built a career and some semblance of a professional and artistic reputation under the name Katie Goodman.

When Liza was five years old her dad and I made the difficult decision to end our marriage.  I’ll always be proud of the way we moved forward amicably, keeping Liza in the forefront of all decisions, and of the two loving homes we have created for her.    When our divorce was fresh I decided to keep my married name reasoning that I wanted the same name as my daughter and I wanted to keep my professional identity, which seemed to rest on this name.   Then David got remarried and suddenly there were two “Mrs. Goodmans.”  I wanted to honor his new wife’s place in his family, and gently told Liza I was thinking about retaking my maiden name.   Her howls of protest were deafening.   “People won’t know you’re my mommmmmmmm!” She wailed.   “We won’t be a fammmmmiiillllly!”   (Why is it that only 8 year olds know how to draw out otherwise lovely and benign words like ‘mom’ and ‘family’ to the point where they be come unbearable?) . I succumbed to her pleas and, let’s be honest, gave in to my inherent laziness and loathing for red tape, and  never  took the next step to change my name.

The subject lay dormant until early June when New Hampshire passed its’ landmark marriage equality bill.   Kelly and I had gone out to dinner to celebrate this historic occasion and the more pedestrian installation of our new carpet.   As we sat in our car bathed by the lights of Elm Street we spontaneously proposed to each other and symbolically moved our rings from our right to our left hands.   Later as we toasted our engagement with a fine shiraz at the Firefly Bistro I proclaimed “I can’t wait to marry you Kelly Ann Collins.”  “And I can’t wait to marry you Mary Katherine…uh….Youngs…uh Goodman,” she replied.    Huh.   What WAS my name anyway?  Understandably Kelly wasn’t too keen about marrying me with a last name that belonged to my ex husband,.  I realized the time had come to really get serious about changing my name back to Youngs.

But I was about to be thrown another curveball.

This week, when I told Kelly that I promised to move forward with finally going back to my maiden name she said “well since you’re going to change it why not just change it to Collins?”   In a million years I never thought that this marriage would be one that asked yet another name change of me.   “Hmmm,” I joked “don’t you think Katie and Kelly Collins sounds just a wee bit precious?”  “I think it sounds great!” she said.  “Well why don’t you take MY name?” I proposed.  “Because I’ve had this name for 42 years and I like it “ she said…you’ve already gone ‘round willy-nilly changing your name so I figure you can do it again right?”

“But,” I protested, “so much of my famly is gone now I feel strongly I want to preserve my family name and go back to Youngs.”   Of course  the 10-year old peanut gallery had to chime in from the dining room table where it was finishing up its math homework.   “Mommmmmm” (there it is again)  “your brother has the last name Youngs and he has three boys and they’ll get married and have kids and there will be lots more Youngs, so you can keep your name the way it is…Goodman.”   “But…”  said Kelly.  “But… “ said Liza.

“ENOUGH!”  I bellowed.  “This is my name and my name only and at the end of the day none of you get to decide what my name is…not you Liza, not you Kelly , not my ex husband, and not the guy at the coffee shop.”   They grudgingly and a bit sullenly went back to their homework and dinner clean up while I pondered how my name could produce such a strong reaction in them.   While, I had tried to reassure Liza that of course we’d still be a family no matter what my last name was.  I battled with the niggling worry that without the same last name as my daughter I would somehow lose that public recognition that I was her mother especially now that her dad and step-mom had another baby who shared her last name and were the very picture of a traditional family.  Would there be confusion at school? Would they still call me in emergencies or immediately call her dad and step mom?  Would I be relegated to the sidelines? Would it be weird?   I also struggled with Kelly’s desire that I take her name and the resentment I felt at her assumption that I would be the one who did so.  Was I still the ‘former straight person” in this relationship who would be asked to assume the more traditional role of wife?  I. Don’t. Think. So.   But then I haven’t been Katie Youngs in nearly 20 years.  The name sounds foreign and strange on my tongue and I’d have to give up my carefully perfected Katie Goodman scrawl on the bottom of documents and checks.   Even this blog bears my married name in its URL, even THAT would have to change.  Why is this issue of my name so loaded for so many?   Who am I anyway? Who have I been these past five years that I clung to my married name. Who should I be next year at this time?

What do you think?

Just Be Glad I Didn’t Get the Matching Pants

Living with Kelly comes with many perks – she cooks wonderful meals, empties the dishwasher, lets me put my feet in her lap while we plow our way through episode after episode of “Nurse Jackie” on demand, and of course lets me borrow her clothes.   Within days of her moving in I had already pilfered a few of her choice argyle sweaters and she had plundered my collection of button down shirts.   So when I returned home the other day to a pile of clothes in the living room and Kelly’s excited proclamation she had gone shopping my first thought of course was “what can I borrow?” Her pants were out of the question as Kelly’s inseam is a good four inches shorter than mine, although there was some promise in a few of the new tops. Then she showed me the vest.

It was pink — bright pink velour with rows of satiny trim on the collar and the unfortunately placed pockets.  I bit back my initial reaction of “are you kidding me?” and smiled and murmured a vague “mmmmmm” instead.    Now Kelly is no fool.  One of the things I love best about her is she always knows what I’m thinking – sometimes even before I do.   She knew I didn’t like the vest and she plotted the perfect moment to wear it.

This morning Kelly showered as I curled up with my coffee and contemplated the day ahead – some grocery shopping, a quick errand at Home Depot and then afternoon rehearsal followed by a pint or two at a nearby Irish Pub.  It was the perfect agenda for a gray day that would bring the first fat wet snowflakes of the year.   “I’m all set!”  Kelly called and I unfolded myself from the couch and headed upstairs to shower.   There she stood in our bedroom in all her glory, jeans, black long sleeve t-shirt and….the vest.   To complete the look she had added hot pink socks and her sturdy black nursing clogs.  As I groped carefully for my response she smiled wickedly, zipped the vest, stroked the velour and said “oooh yeah baby…. You hate this don’t you?”

Later in the car I got lost in the rhythm of the windshield wipers Kelly asked what I was going to write about next and I replied “that vest.”  We spent the next ten-fifteen minutes coming up with lines for my blog ranging from “the bejeweled zipper pull momentarily blinded me,” to “her popped collar and matching pink socks sent me flashing back to 1986,” to  “I didn’t know there was that much pink velour still in existence.”   Laughing to the point of tears, we pulled into the grocery store parking lot where I said  “you go on ahead, I’ll catch up with you.”  “Oh no lady,” Kelly replied,  “you can’t lose me in this vest, I’m like a beacon in the night.   As we entered the store I thought of how much laughter Kelly has brought into my life, the way my heart feels lighter when I’m with her, the way she inspires me to follow my passions, see beauty in myself, and let go of so many of my anxieties.  This quiet reverie came to an abrupt halt when Kelly turned to me, smoothed the vest, sucked in her cheeks, struck a pose and said “just be glad I didn’t get the matching pants.”

What I didn’t say — what I should have said –is that even in matching pink velour track pants there is no one I’d rather be seen with.

“There’s a Cat In the Freezer”, and Other Tales of Early Co-Habitation

Two weeks ago today I nervously reflected on what life would be like when Kelly and I joined households. I worried we’d bicker over cleaning or bump into each other in my tiny kitchen, that Liza would resent this other person taking away my attention and that none of us would get any sleep. My anxious tendencies in high gear I put all my acting skills to the test in order to appear calm as if I merged my life with someone else’s all the time. “Don’t freak out,” Kelly said on move-in day “when you see all the boxes in the basement.” Heading downstairs I found my desk, my clean quiet sanctuary for writing, bill paying, Face-booking and general escapism was now barricaded by box after box of Kelly’s books, pictures, kitchen gadgets and cat paraphernalia. Surely ever liquor store in sight had been raided for their boxes I thought idly while wishing that the Captain Morgan box held a leftover bottle or two instead of Kelly’s collection of private school yearbooks. “Heyyyyyy, no problem!” I replied with the exaggerated politeness of new college roommates on the first day of freshman year. “See how calm I am?” I said as I tried to figure out what we were going to do with three boxes of powdered sugar, two boxes of kosher salt and four bottles of olive oil, not to mention the seven (yes seven) varieties of shower gel our combined households had yielded. But that night as we sat, feet propped on the coffee table, wine in hand I looked around at the house, at the cats now venturing out from their hiding places under my mom’s old chair in the basement, and the soft glow of Kelly’s 42 inch flat screen tv and thought how nice this was going to be, this having Kelly with me every night as we blissfully headed into our future.

Then she started hanging things up.

Kelly possesses a wonderful and quirky collection of old school black and white photos of 1920s era sirens, a beautiful assortment of framed Charles Rennie Mackintosh prints, and pretty much every movie still from “Paper Moon” in existence. The ”who gets to hang what and where” discussion made our negotiations over which set of measuring cups and spoons we’d keep out look like child’s play. “Just because you HAVE all these things doesn’t mean you HAVE to hang them UP,” I said. “Just because you’ve ALWAYS had that stuff on the walls doesn’t mean you have to KEEP it up she replied.” We compromised, we haggled and in the end we both gave and we both got. She got to hang Paper Moon photos up our stairwell but gave in and replaced the twenties harlots in her classy black frames with great family photos of our Maine vacation and I agreed to take down a lovely but admittedly new-agey print about friendship. Her gorgeous prints look fabulous in our dining room but she conceded that really not all of them fit it and would be ok to leave a few down. The end result feels cohesive and very very much us.

Last Sunday I felt a new anxiety as I prepared for Liza to come home. I called her dad to see if he’d bring her by for a ‘dry run’ so she could scope out the changes to the house in advance. “I don’t want to come home to you ever again,” she said sullenly over the phone. “Ok then see you soon!” I said brightly in my “oh goodness no that remark didn’t hurt my feelings voice.” Then I went upstairs lay on my bed and cried. But God bless my ex-husband for coming through and bringing Liza over to see the new dining room table, the new artwork, the cats and much to her delight the new “way better than yours momma” TV. This dress rehearsal for the real thing seemed to do the trick and in spite of spending most of Monday worrying about how Liza would be when I picked her up at school, her re-entry into our home went surprisingly well. After a few bumps figuring out whether the cats would take to her (yes) and whether she wanted them in her room at night (no) we all settled in and Liza even opined that “it was fun here momma, I like having the cats.”

Ah yes. The cats.

While I’ve been pleasantly surprised that the cats don’t’ seem to be underfoot as much as I thought they’d be, and the shedding isn’t bad this time of year, and the Zyrtec seems to be keeping Liza’s allergies at bay, having four felines in residence has taken a bit of getting used to. They open my closet door and rappel up my hangers so they can nap on top of my sweaters, they tiptoe along the top of my bookcase, they commandeer the top of the fridge and climb in the dishwasher when I empty it in the mornings. One time I took some frozen waffles out of the freezer, set them on the counter and looked up to find one of the cats sitting in the freezer as if it was the most natural thing in the world. They can hear me flip open my laptop from 2 floors away and within minutes I will have one on the keyboard, one on my lap and one on my shoulders as if to say “whatcha writing?” A stuffed dog Liza won at an arcade has been kidnapped by one of our boy cats and we find it all over the house. But what has surprised me the most about living with the cats is something that I know I will take endless ribbing for because it defies my carefully cultivated ‘Cranky Yankee” demeanor: I love them. I love the way they cuddle between me and Kelly at night, the way one of them lies out side Liza’s door as if standing guard, the way they watch for me to come home from the kitchen window and the way they run downstairs with me in the morning when I feed them. I expected to grudgingly tolerate them. I didn’t expect to be so completely totally won over.

In the past few weeks our home has begun to settle into new rhythms and new routines – Kelly helping Liza with math while I make dinner, both of us teaching her funny songs and ways to remember her science vocabulary while we linger at the table. When Kelly leaves for work in the morning I open Liza’s bedroom door and she lies in bed cuddling with a cat or two while I shower and got ready. Her mood has gotten brighter. I’m smiling more. We ‘re all sleeping better. My thoughts during the day turn to home and wanting to be with my lady and my girl rather than finding reasons to work longer or take on more commitments. For the first time in over five years I have something to come home to that I’ve wanted for so long: A family, A real family under one roof. Here’s to the next chapter!